Chapter 7 - S-E-X

When puberty hit everything changed. Once the hormone switch turns on, there’s no turning it off again. My sister and I still played paper dolls, mostly we designed clothes for them, but instead of Betsy McCall paper dolls, we now went in for movie star/model types. We all still played football and baseball and shot baskets in the back yard, and we still played outdoor games. The difference is that we now preferred games where a boy had to touch you, or tackle you, or wrestle you. We much preferred to play after dark and we dropped “Hill Dill” for “Hide and Seek”. We were very aware that these were coed activities. All of a sudden I became very self-conscious around neighbor boys I had taken for granted for years.
This is when I began to realize that, although I got some great “birth gifts”, physical beauty was not one of them. I had to shop for my dresses in the Chubby department, a nomenclature that, thank goodness is now obsolete. By the time I was fourteen I wore a 36C bra.
I was the only one in my gym class who wore a bra, so I hid almost inside my locker when we changed our clothes so that my ugly bra would not stand out among all the pretty undershirts. Probably everyone saw me and my bra any way, but I didn’t know because I didn’t look. I felt sloppy and awkward and clumsy. I spent hours looking in mirrors and picking at pimples on my face. I didn’t have terrible acne, but I had the normal run of blemishes and blotches, some of which swelled to gargantuan proportions. Mostly I told myself over and over how ugly I was. Since that time I have learned that this is a teen-age rite of passage, but not every teenager suffers these symptoms to the same degree. I bet my sophisticated Long Island roommate never did. First of all, she was beautiful. Second of all she had a handsome, solicitous father who treated her like she was his princess.
When I was fourteen, I read Peyton Place, which I found at the library where I volunteered, and which I hid in a bottom desk drawer, under many papers, until I finished it. It was the first time I started to think about the sexual act itself, how it was done, how it felt, etc. I loved reading this book, but hated reading it too. While I was reading I would feel a certain heaviness, lassitude. My body would become hot and flushed and I would become extraordinarily aware of my body against the seat of the chair. If anyone entered the library, and very few people did, I would hide the book away in the desk drawer and pull myself back into the world of human interaction. At first I would resent them for interrupting my illicit biological moment, then I would gradually feel lighter and friendlier, the fourteen-year-old self I recognized.
After that I discovered my joy button and I spent a lot of private time at home pushing it. But I did not get any opportunities to have s-e-x with real boys. First of all, I was not ready for that. Although the idea of being kissed appealed to me, having sex with an actual man or boy did not occur to me. Second, no boys tried. I did not go out with any boys in high school at all. I was terribly shy at school. I did not even talk to boys except the ones in the neighborhood, and I spoke to them less and less frequently. I watched them; I developed a few long distance crushes, but none that were returned. I didn’t even miss it yet, having a boyfriend. Apparently I would be what is known as a late bloomer.
When I wanted a partner for my sexual activities (such as they were), I just closed my eyes and a faceless man would appear. He was really just a vague male figure, broad shoulders, nicely dressed. I could not really undress him except for his shirt because I had never seen a grown man naked. I was still determined not to get married and ruin my life. But I did want to fall in love and I did want to know all about s-e-x. I had a long crush on Marty Zeferelli, but my best friend at the time decided she did too. She would embarrass me by writing notes to him. She told me that she told him that I liked him and I got so angry with her. Or we would gaze at him and giggle in the lunchroom. How junior high is this? And that’s the age we were. We were only in eighth or ninth grade. Marty didn’t like either one of us. He let us know by his nonverbal reactions that we were just an embarrassment. We were lucky he didn’t decide to get revenge. And thus, without ever actually being in love I managed to have my first broken heart.
Books – now I love books and reading, don’t get me wrong. I could immerse myself so completely in a book that it truly was like a time machine or a “place” machine. My present world and its circumstances would disappear. And in some ways this is a good thing, especially for a poor child. It definitely broadens your horizons and very inexpensively too. But in other ways it can be unhealthy. For one thing, it can turn you into a sort of passive observer of life, one who stands back and watches, describes and analyses others, a person who is not a live-r of life. For another, it kind of makes you believe that things will happen to you with little or no effort on your part. Fictional characters can become more real then actual people. Everyone including one’s self can become an archetype. Instead of learning your actual self, you may imagine and re-imagine your self. Life can happen like a story plot. Each “story” or segment of life can seem self-contained, with a beginning, middle, and an end. It can seem as if the events from one “story line” cannot affect the events in the next episode. Wrong!
I imagined myself as a heroic character, struggling to be larger than life. I would be as independent and smart and self sufficient as Jo in Little Women, for example. Instead of working on me, I bemoaned my inability to be my heroine of the moment. Books and movies affected me so strongly. A book or a movie could move me to hysterical sobs and righteous anger about some injustice or personal pain experienced by a character. Or it might move me to tears of joy and brain waves of sunny optimism. I grew used to living other’s lives instead of my own.
People gave our family boxes and boxes of books. Some were classics; most were bestsellers or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read more than anyone in my family and we were a family of readers. I read everything I could get my hands on, good, bad, or indifferent. I also saw every movie I could get to, except horror movies. After Tarantula I didn’t bother with any more movies that I could only watch with my hands in front of my eyes. I don’t even remember most of what I read. I do remember the Bobbsey Twins, which I read about a million times when I was seven. I remember Nancy
Drew. I also remember Heidi, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and “Archie” and “Superman” and “Spiderman” and Treasure Island.
I became aware of the world’s injustices. When I read The Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus, I was aghast at the Holocaust. From Inherit the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird I learned about narrow mindedness and prejudice. West Side Story, the sound track, which I learned by heart (and which everyone else in the family also learned whether they wanted to or not) brought Romeo and Juliet, ill-fated love, and gangs to life. My uncle had a book The Last Days of Pompeii, a chilling account of what it was probably like when the volcano buried Pompeii. Here was the awesome and malevolent power of nature. Life was deep. Everyday life, even s-e-x with real boys, could not hold a candle to this.
Not everyone in the family was so standoffish about S-E-X. I think by the time Felicity had graduated from high school and started in the community college, she was “doing it”. And right upstairs in her new little bed-sitting room too. Tyler, I’m sure was doing it, and Gertie, well; we’ll talk about that late. She was a whole other type of Taylor. But I wasn’t anywhere near to doing the deed. Although I was privately titillated by it, I didn’t even like to talk about it.
Then there was the whole issue of getting your “friend.” I guess someone thought up that euphemism to put a positive spin on a sometimes-yucky fact of life. I got my “friend” when I was eleven, Felicity must have too because she already had hers when I got mine. And Gertie followed a couple of years later. There were no mini-celebrations in the Taylor household when you became a woman. Instead you inherited the “Welcome to Maturity” booklet (or whatever it was called) from the Kotex box to read, and Mom took you aside to communicate the hygiene essentials.
My father did all the shopping and he would bring home the giant economy sized box of Kotex. He must have been embarrassed, but he never mentioned it. We used paper lunch bags for disposal, so when you saw someone sneaking into the bathroom with their little lunch bag in hand you knew exactly what time of the month it was for them. Gertie loved to talk about her “friend” in excruciating detail, but I felt that it was not an appropriate topic for casual conversation. The less said about it the better.
I thought a lot about how nice it would be if women didn’t have to have a period every month just so they could get pregnant if they wanted to. It seemed like overkill, biological redundancy, and a sad state of affairs for the female of the species. Not to mention that you could get pregnant when you didn’t want to and that this could be very, very bad. It would be nice if there was an on-off switch that you could make event specific, not the switch that turned on at puberty and off at menopause, but a switch that could be turned off and on at will. Maybe the switch could have a food trigger, off with chocolate, on with a jalapeno pepper, something like that. Of course you’d have to avoid chocolate when you wanted to get pregnant. That would be hard. But I assume that once the baby was planted you could go back to eating chocolate. I never did work out the fine points. Maybe someone has a better idea.
Anyway, with all these raging female hormones around the house, Tyler’s injection of testosterone kind of got lost in the shuffle, except for some talk about facial hair and shaving and his rigid, zealous drive for privacy he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
In college, my sophisticated Long Island roommate had a boyfriend who went to school in Kentucky or Tennessee or somewhere south of the Mason/Dixon line. She ran up huge phone bills talking to him with her blankets pulled over her head. The college was crowded; we were three to a room. But I never heard a word of her romantic conversations. With 500+ girls in one dorm and the Beatles playing top force up and down the hallways, girls dancing, talking, setting or ironing each other’s hair, or arguing, it was impossible to hear much. I didn’t mind it, I was used to chaos, but when I had to study I usually had to leave the dorm. Did you remember that Audrey Hepburn smoked? So did most of the girls in my dorm. We didn’t know from second-hand smoke.
I went out on my first dates in college. I was thinner, I had fashion consultants now, and I had my hair colored blonde and cut in a new mod style. One of my memorable dates was with a very cute guy with a suction kiss. He was a great kisser; he connected right from the mouth to the joy spot. I only went out with him once. He never asked again. Probably he had expected more from his hard work. But it taught me what I could expect from a good kiss. It raised my standards. By senior year I had met my Irish folk singer and my best friend had hooked up with his actor friend, and the four of us hung out. We went to the coffee house a lot so Ian could play and sing with the other folk singers. Ian’s uncle was our Irish Lit. professor and Ian took us to his uncle’s house sometimes, where we could sit in front of the fire and drink Irish coffee. I loved the idea of Ian.
The World’s Fair was in Montreal that year so we went. Ian flirted throughout the trip with my best friend. We had arranged it so I would spend the night at Ian’s apartment instead of at the dorm, but I was so angry (?scared) from all the flirting that I wouldn’t. Thus ended my first real relationship. I fled home where I was treated to a mini-makeover and antidepressants and arrived back at college in time to graduate. Still a virgin.
I’m sure you’re wondering what all this has to do with my cigarette addiction. Well I will tell you that my initiation into the mysteries of inhaling and sexual intercourse happened at almost the same instant.